


Circle Image No. 25

by greenbucket



Series: Late Night [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 01:16:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13283865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbucket/pseuds/greenbucket
Summary: She just wants to look nice for Larissa, really, even though neither of them have said it’s a date. It feels like a date, maybe.





	Circle Image No. 25

**11 days left**

Ford and Larissa meet up a few days later, during the day at Larissa’s parents’ house while her parents are out at work. It’s like being in high school, listening out for if they’re arriving in the driveway. Larissa’s childhood bedroom is pasted floor to ceiling with posters and the kind of scraps Ford would reserve for scrapbooking, the squat bookcase crammed haphazardly with kid books and some YA and academic texts and comics and a tonne on art techniques. Larissa reaches up and knocks a painted wooden mobile near the door when she comes in without even seeming to think about it, making the bells on it tinkle cheerily.

Not that Ford gets much time to look around Larissa’s room. This time Larissa is the one that goes down on her, licks broad and firm until Ford can’t catch her breath and she knows she must be getting loud, her orgasm stretching on and on when Larissa finally focuses on her clit. Ford barely has to touch her in return before Larissa’s shaking apart under her with a long groan, coming down just in time for the sound of keys in the lock.

Her and Ford scramble to look presentable and occupied but Ford isn’t sure Larissa’s mom is fooled. She leaves soon after with her cheeks still burning.

 

**9 days left**

They arrange to get lunch two days after that. Ford somehow feels more self-conscious about it than the two times they’d had sex, fiddling with the way she’s knotted her headband and second-guessing her lipstick choice in the mirror by the door. Her aunt pokes her head out of the living room to see what’s taking her while Ford applies an entirely unnecessary third coat of lipstick.

“Weren’t you going for lunch?” she asks. “You know you’re just going to lose it all to your food, honey.”

Ford puts the lipstick in her purse. She can reapply between bites, dammit. “I know, I just,” she says but leaves it there because she isn’t sure. She just wants to look nice for Larissa, really, even though neither of them have said it’s a date. It feels like a date, maybe.

“Well you look very cute,” her aunt says. “You’re growing up to be such a stunning young woman, you really are.”

Ford feels a mix of pride and embarrassment. “Thanks, auntie.”

Her aunt beckons her over to give her a pinch and a kiss on the cheek, like she’s a _great_ -aunt, but the knowing look in her eye betrays that as she says, “Now go before you’re even later than you already are for your date.”

“ _Auntie_ ,” Ford whines but she goes. She hates being late, has the feeling Larissa doesn’t have much patience to spare for it either, and she still needs to get the T and figure out the walk from the stop to get to the little café Larissa had suggested.

It’s hot enough outside that Ford feels uncomfortably sweaty by the time she makes it to the café with the help of Google Maps. Larissa looks impossibly cool and collected in comfy looking shorts and a tank top, waiting for Ford just inside the boundaries of the shade.

Ford feels no small amount of relief when Larissa pulls Ford in for a one-armed hug and Larissa’s skin is just as overwarm and tacky as her own. At least they can both smell like a combination of oh-no-it’s-sweltering sweat and half-heartedly applied deodorant without fear of judgement.

Ford leans in and kisses Larissa’s cheek, because it’s not a date but cheek-kisses aren’t just for dates and, besides, Ford doesn’t know how to contain the dizzy rush inside her for the whole lunch otherwise, if this is just how she’s feeling half a minute in. It’s hard to tell with the shade, and with the way she faux preens and leads the way into the café, but Ford is pretty sure Larissa’s cheeks go slightly pink.

 

**8 days left**

Larissa comes to visit Ford at the theatre after she’s done interning for the day.

There isn’t a show on that night so Ford shows Larissa around, leading her by the hand because she can as she explains the history of the building and tries to remember just how many injuries there have been to do with the orchestra pit. She doesn’t know its stories quite like those of the ones back home but that doesn’t seem to bother Larissa, who listens intently all the way.

They end up making out in one of the dressing rooms, just for a little bit, and there’s not enough time for food after but they walk along Charles River for a while. Larissa talks about when she was sixteen and obsessed with painting water and came to the river as often as she could, just to end up with nonsensical page after page of blue green white brown grey smudges.

“It’s was the most boring and pretentious-ass shit I’ve ever done,” Larissa says, laughing a little at her past herself, “But I for real thought I was revolutionising art at the time, so at least I was having a blast.”

Ford thinks, privately, that she’d like to see some of the paintings anyway, just to get an idea of how Larissa sees things.

 

**6 days left**

They go to a poetry night, because they’re both terrible like that. Neither of them are particularly fond of poetry, or know any of the technicalities of it, but it’s a pleasant evening. Ford finds that even when she just doesn’t quite get the poetry, she appreciates the signposting of some interesting themes for her to think about in her own time.

It’s nice, too, to be a bit mean and trash poetry as a discipline with Larissa afterwards.

“Like, who needs words for that kind of shit, you know? You don’t gotta articulate every feeling you’ve ever had, you can just feel it and that’s legit,” Larissa is saying in the too-bright light of the much tackier café they’ve relocated to. Then a moment later, with an air of revelation, “Plus, poetry actually makes it all _harder_ to understand? So literally what is the point.”

If Larissa hadn’t proved herself deeply capable of handling her alcohol, Ford might have thought Larissa was on her way to buzzed from the drinks she’d bought them both at the bar to make the poetry palatable. She’s starting to move loose-limbed and easy as she talks, the way she had been when Ford had first spotted her under the switching club lights.

It’s entirely too enthralling to focus on for long.

“Some people would say they don’t understand the point of art,” Ford points out instead.

“Some people are wrong,” Larissa is quick to state. “Or do you want me to start picking at theatre, too?”

Ford has nearly come to blows with people over the importance of theatre before. It’s a conversation that definitely needs to wait until she’s known someone longer than a week. “Let’s go back to why poetry’s bad,” she says, taking a sip of water to ease her drying mouth as Larissa gets back into the flow of her poetry opinions.

 

**5 days left**

They meet up after Larissa finishes her shift and eat fast food on the back steps, accompanied by a bored co-worker that smokes his cigarette all the way down to the filter before sighing heavily and going back inside.

Larissa eats her fries three at a time and Ford loses half their sauce misjudging where the packet had ripped. They swap their milkshakes halfway through because they’re too big for the flavors not to get boring otherwise. Ford catches Larissa looks lingering more than usual, but neither of them say anything and it just stays there, hovering between them.

If Ford wanted to make Larissa laugh, she’d make some crack about the tension being like so much oil in the deep fry basins the other side of the wall behind them; just waiting for a catalyst to really start sizzling. Sex as a basket of French fries or chicken drumsticks in spitting oil may be lacking somewhere in the sensual imagery department, but Ford thinks she’s getting to know what kind of things Larissa likes. 

But then sometimes whatever tension it is – the sexual, of course, but the other bit, too – feels too fragile for that. Ford catches Larissa looking, and Larissa doesn’t look away but there’s no come-hither smirk or look in her eye that has heat spooling in Ford’s stomach, there’s just an honest looking, a searching. Ford doesn’t want to poke that tension too much, in interest or in humour, in case it breaks in an unfixable way under the focus.

She slurps the last dregs of one of their shared milkshakes obnoxiously loudly instead, and Larissa groans and tries to shove Ford off the step for her crimes before slurping the remains of hers even louder, grinning around the straw when she breaks for air.

 

**4 days left**

They go to an art museum. It’s a lot, because Ford likes museums in their own right but has little opportunity to go, and because Larissa is in her element. Ford falls for the five postcards for $3 trick in the gift shop and lets Larissa pick whichever ones she wants to take for herself; she takes one of Castle’s _Ducks_ and Schanker’s _Circle Image No. 25_ , tucking them into her bag with care.

 

**2 days left**

They have sex, one more time.

They’re at Larissa’s again and they press close and fumble messily like they’re drunk or entirely new to this. Ford likes Larissa a lot, probably too much, and it makes her _feel_ new to this, makes her gasp and shudder into Larissa’s mouth as her fingers press inside. It’s a tricky arrangement with both of them using their hands on the other without looking, and it takes longer than it would if they just took turns with each other.

It feels like a fair payoff when they come within seconds of each other, sweeter for the build-up and Larissa’s mouth open against the crook of Ford’s shoulder, Ford breathing heavy through a face full of Larissa’s hair. Her hair smells of equal parts grease and shampoo and is all in her mouth but Ford doesn’t move away.

 

**1 day left**

They go to the park near Ford’s aunt’s in the evening.

It’s quieter than it’s been when Ford had gone there in the day before, children shepherded home by their parents for dinner. The sun is still high enough for it to be warm, but the swing seats aren’t burning-hot against their bared skin when they sit on them. They just talk and relax, migrating from swings to climbing frame to the cool grass. Ford makes a passable daisy chain and Larissa makes her wear it.

When they kiss it’s much later and the park is starting to get cold, the sun fully hidden behind the buildings all around.

Ford knows they should probably talk about it, but she’s scared and Larissa’s comment that giving voice to things doesn’t make them more real echoes in her head and it just feels too fragile and fresh and new. She has to go back to Madison tomorrow, and then she’ll be back at college all the way across the country from Larissa, and she just wants to get some kissing in now while she can before it all gets difficult.

Within the limits of what can reasonably be done in a public park, that is, even though it’s dark. They reach those limits pretty quickly and Ford knows she has to stop it there; her travel criteria starts too early for her to be up all hours getting some.

“So, about tomorrow…” Ford starts, once she thinks she’s cooled down enough.

Larissa finishes for her, mock sombre, “I know, you’re back into the wilderness.”

“It’s not the _wilderness_ , it’s Wisconsin.”

Larissa shrugs. “Same difference.”

“Come visit me sometime,” Ford says, “and you’ll see it’s a city, just like here but probably better.”

Larissa just blinks at her and Ford realises she’s just invited Larissa to visit her actual house and doesn’t know what to do with herself.

“I’d rather come visit you in Seattle,” Larissa says, taking mercy on Ford. “It’s not in the Midwest, for one.”

Ford laughs at that. “No, you wouldn’t. The cost of living is the price of your soul for, like, three days.”

“Just three days? Kinda shitty deal,” Larissa says, but she doesn’t invite Ford to Samwell. That’s fair enough, Ford thinks, but it leaves them at the awkward junction of a goodbye they had been at before.

They’re still sitting in the grass and it’s getting uncomfortably cold. Ford can only see bits of Larissa’s face in the light of the distant streetlamp, but it’s enough to see Larissa’s watching her back, like before behind Larissa’s fast food place.

Ford wants to say something, something honest and from the heart enough that she isn’t quite sure what it’s going to be when it comes out of her mouth yet. She’s still scared, but she doesn’t want to regret not saying anything at all. Better to have whatever tension break for good, here where there’s a natural ending anyway if it comes to that, than to never know.

“Larissa, I–”

Larissa jumps to her feet, brushing grass and mud off her legs. “This has been good. I’ll see you around, right?”

Ford feels a little horribly turned around with Larissa’s abruptness and she gets to her feet too but it’s still too dark to see Larissa’s expression. The cool night has turned clammy, and her hands feel all fiddly like she’s a little kid impatient in nursery classes again. “Of course it’s been good,” Ford says, because that’s true at least. “But shouldn’t we…?”

Larissa’s mouth twists unhappily but she still says, “Ford, let’s not– this has been good, right? I’ve had a _great_ couple of weeks. But you’ll be there and I’ll be here,” and here Larissa shrugs, like that’s that.

“So you don’t want…?”

“No,” Larissa says, and then, “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. Who knows. I wanna stay in touch, okay? And we’ll see.”

Ford’s chest feels a little tight and for all they weren’t dating their entire conversation feels way too close to a break up for comfort. “Yeah, sure, me too,” she says because there isn’t anything else to say.

She can’t be very convincing because Larissa reaches out and takes Ford’s clammy hands in her own. Being earnest with words isn’t Larissa’s strength, but it’s comforting to see her try as she says, “I’m being for real, Ford. I have had a great fucking time. It’s been… it’s been _swawesome_.”

Ford nods. It has been swawesome, a little bit of Samwell slang for her to take home with her as a memento even if she doesn’t know what’s going to happen with Larissa. She squeezes Larissa’s hands back, tells her as steady as she can, “Don’t be a stranger, all right?”

Larissa smiles, echoes it back to her. They walk together quietly until they reach the street corner where their routes diverge, and Ford doesn’t know their boundaries now – if she ever did – so she just waves and turns down the street to her aunt’s house, staying firm with herself.

 

* * *

 

Hey, Larissa, it’s Ford! Just thought I would let you know I got back home okay. Thank you for such a nice time showing me around Boston :)  
[Sent: 8.12.15, 21:19. Delivered]

So how have you been?  
[Sent: 8.13.15, 23:10. Delivered]

Saw this duck in my friend’s front yard :)  
[Sent: 8.29.15, 15:42. Picture attached. Delivered]

HEy its my BIRHDAY and it was REALLY  F uN. we had lalcojhol even tho Im ONL y 20!!! Shhhh don’t tell. U should HAVE COME!!!! i mad e out with theis REall y nice gil brut lik e Remebmbre when i fuirst went d o urn on y and hthrat ws SO  h ot  
[Sent: 9.7.15, 4:22. Delivered]

Hey, Larissa. Really, really sorry about that, drunk me is a mess and shouldn’t have access to phones evidently! Back to the grindstone at UW soon, hope you’re doing okay if you’re already at Samwell.  
[Sent: 9.7.15, 12:58. Delivered]

 

 

 

 

hi ford, it’s larissa  
[Sent: 9.26.15, 18:01. Delivered]

sorry i’ve been awol  
[Sent: 9.26.15, 18:14. Delivered.]

im back at samwell and it’s chill. hope uw is treating u well  
[Sent: 9.26.15, 18:17. Delivered.]

 

Ford watches as each text arrives, eyes flicking between the lit-up screen and then back again to her work each time. Her heart is beating double time somewhere in the area of her throat but actually getting a response from Larissa after all this time hasn’t actually soothed any of Ford’s hurt; if anything, it’s brought it back with a stinging vengeance.

A month of silence and then ‘sorry i’ve been awol’ is all Ford gets? ‘hope uw is treating u well’? That doesn’t even call for an answer. Ford should just leave it – their thing was fun, and it was sweet, and Ford still thinks about it a lot, but it was two weeks, a literal summer fling. Larissa had agreed not to be a stranger but clearly she hadn’t meant it because friends, or whatever they were or are, don’t leave each other hanging for a month.

Ford tries to focus on her readings again with little luck. Her room suddenly feels itchy on her skin, the walls to tight, her perfectly condition desk chair all wrong. She wants to get up and do something, not sit here having all these feelings she was just managing to push aside come tumbling back.

Feeling petty, she opens the messages, so Larissa will see that she’s read them and has no intention to respond. Let her wait.

She watches the little three dots bubble pop in and out of existence on her screen for a few minutes instead. Whatever it is Larissa’s been stewing on for a month seems to still be a struggle to get out. The longer Ford watches, the more the pettiness and the anger fades and the more the sadness settles in.

It had hurt to be so thoroughly ghosted. Ford had felt stupid and needy and clingy, but Larissa had agreed they should stay in touch and there had been nothing from her. Absolutely zero for Ford to go on, no feedback of any kind. The messages hadn’t even been read last Ford had checked.

And before she’d hit hurt, she’d been on a sickly journey through every variety of worried that something had happened to Larissa. Only a shameful Facebook search that showed some recent activity under the name Larissa Duan had given Ford answers, and then she’d been hurt that Larissa hadn’t cared about making her worried on top of hurt that she’d been rejected entirely.

It had sucked.

And watching Larissa labour over whatever she’s trying to say sucks too. Ford doesn’t want to stretch it out into some kind of endless grudge match of hurt feelings, to waste another month not talking. Ford loves her friends at UW, loves the life she has here, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t missed Larissa and the sudden stalling of whatever it was they had.

But all the theoretical emotional maturity in the world still doesn’t stop her feeling hurt.

Flipping her phone face down, Ford turns up her study playlist and forces herself to finish her assigned chapters for tomorrow. She tucks her phone into the inside pocket of her bag without checking the screen when her watch and her stomach tell her its time for the dining hall, and she makes a concerted effort to focus on her friends at the table with her, relaxing into it for real as the meal goes on.

It’s late by the time Ford gets back to her room and ready for bed and finally looks at her phone screen again. There are about a million notifications, but none are from Larissa. Ford flicks through her email for a bit, between social medias, thinking.

If there’s one thing Ford hates, it’s the feeling of regret from missing the opportunity for something amazing just because she was too unsure, or unprepared, or scared. She feels plenty of all of those things when it comes to whatever is going on between her and Larissa: she’s never had a real relationship before, and it would be long distance, and they’re both busy all the time, and there are probably a thousand issues Ford isn’t even considering. She doesn’t know if Larissa even really wants all, or any, of the things with her that Ford wants with Larissa.

But she’ll never know if she doesn’t go for it.

Ford carefully considers the artiest way to capture her (cliché and faltering) fairy lights over her notice board with only an iPhone and Snapchat filters at her disposal. She goes for the simple look, in the end: a straight on photo with the UW Snapchat filter across the bottom of the screen, the caption reading ‘it’s treating me pretty good’.

She scrolls through the suggested contacts from her phone to the one she can tell is Larissa’s from the bitmoji alone, since she doesn’t get what the username ‘Lardo’ is supposed to mean.

Ford takes a deep breath, checks over the snap for anything embarrassing one last time, and hits send. She immediately bundles herself up in her comforter and shoves her phone away from herself, willing herself to fall asleep as soon as possible so she can forget the churning in her stomach.

There’s the ping of a new snap being sent her way from her phone.

Ford’s arm is snaking out the covers to grab it on automatic, and her heart is racing, and she nearly pokes an eye out shoving her glasses back on, and it’s all worth it when there it is:

Snapchat from Lardo

Ford opens it with her breath held like her phone might explode in her hand from it.

It’s Larissa, tired-looking and washed out with only laptop light in an otherwise dark room, a blanket pulled up over her head. The caption reads ‘it’s chill’. She’s added the temperature, which is ridiculously cold for the time of year, and makes Ford feel ridiculously warm in her chest.

She screenshots it, because she can. Larissa sends her a bitmoji in the chat function that involves Ford in a cat suit purring and being spooned by a much larger Larissa.

Ford has no fucking clue what it means, but her cheeks hurt from smiling. She’s already searching through the endless varieties for something equally absurd to send back, buzzing down to her fingertips with the new opportunity - whatever it will mean - opening up all over again in front of her.


End file.
